Scholarly Publishing: Peer Review and Open Access

The traditional
structure for academic publishing, viz., peer-reviewed journals, is
being challenged by the spread of open access on the Internet.

As a competent
classical scholar, like others, I have experienced problems with
peer-reviewed journals. The unreasonable demand that authors
surrender their copyright (Marx called this ‘alienation’) means
that I can not post some of my own papers here for you to read,
although I can provide links for them.

More importantly,
although I have had helpful guidance from some editors, others have
subjected my work, which is often interdisciplinary, to reviewers
poorly qualified for the topic or biased and chiefly interested in
blocking the expression of my ideas.

If peer review is a
your fetish, relax: Some open access sites still do it, even though
it is hardly necessary for Internet communications. For this site, I
shall be pleased if you want to assume the function yourself by
submitting comments.